House of the Sun (2 page)

Finally the ancient system came grudgingly online. I slotted the certstick Sharon Young had given me and checked the balance—more from a sense of completeness than because I expected any jiggery-pokery; there's no percentage in stiffing someone on an advance. The numbers came up just the way I'd expected them to: 4,000 nuyen in certified funds. I hit a couple of keys, and my telecom happily transferred the cred from the stick's microchip to my account in the Cheyenne Interface Bank. That made my account ... well, pretty close to 4,000 nuyen, if you wanted to be picky about it. Of that, I earmarked 800¥ for rent, to be siphoned out of my account whenever my landlord got around to it. (I'd already made the mistake of bouncing one transaction off him.
Big
mistake. My landlord was a big, bad, bald ork with a sunburned pate, creased as though someone had wrinkled it up and then tried to flatten it out again. Everyone called him "Mother" and left it at that—probably because anyone who tried to go any further was too busy spitting teeth to finish.)

Banking duties finished, I pressed the keys to display my mail. One message in my default mailbox, the one I use for biz. I thought I knew what that one would be, particularly when I saw that the Matrix code was Cheyenne. Two messages in my private inbox. Since only three people have the passcode, it wasn't tough to guess about those either.

Business before pleasure, unfortunately. Another couple of keystrokes, and the biz message flashed up on the screen. I recognized the digitized image at once. Jenny was her name, troll and proud of it, Amerind and even prouder of that. She wasn't quite a fixer, but she did occasionally broker "consulting" contracts for people she liked. For some reason I had yet to fully understand, she
really
liked me.

I kicked the replay up to double speed, and let my mind drift while Jenny yammered through her message. I knew what it was about, a contract she'd tossed my way a week back as a favor, to help me make my rent. Everything had come out the way the contractor wanted, and Jenny was gushing with overspeed praise. I slipped the replay back to standard speed when it seemed that Jenny was winding down.

"... And if you want to talk about it some more, why don't you come visit some time?" she was saying, with a bedroom smile that would frighten small children. "Our friends will be putting the credit transfer through tomorrow." Her smile grew broader until I thought she'd swallow her ears. "Catch ya later, Bernard." And the screen went blank.

I couldn't help but chuckle. "Bernard." I don't know where it had come from, but the term had swept its way through the shadow underground of the Sioux Nation over the last couple of weeks, a kind of trendy substitute for "chummer" or the Japanese
"omae
." So far it wasn't in common parlance—not yet—but the local shadowrunners and wannabes had cottoned onto it as a kind of lodge recognition signal.

Shadowrunner. It was to laugh. Jenny would drek her drawers if she ever met a
real
shadowrunner. (Christ,
I
almost did my first time.) The kind of biz she brokered might be considered "shadow contracts" if you really stretched the definition of the term, solely because they were mildly illegal, or perhaps extra-legal. All of them were a far cry from the media-fed vision of balls-to-the-wall shadowrunners, tweaking the noses of the megacops while dodging a fusillade of bullets. Been there; done that; too rough; pave it.

Let me tell you about the "run" I'd just completed for Jenny. There was a midrent co-op apartment block on the edge of Cheyenne's downtown core—the Avalon—that had been having problems with chip dealers running their business out of one of the penthouses. Activity all round the clock, disreputable types coming and going, chipheads in the lobby, and all that drek. The renters' council had tried to evict the suspected chipmeisters ... and had been told, in no uncertain terms, that if they filed the necessary papers, their knees, elbows, and other body parts would come into conflict with blunt objects in the hands of hired bone-breakers. The cops couldn't move against the dealers because there was simply no proof. The residents
knew
what was going on, but they couldn't bridge the gulf between knowing and proving.

Enter Dirk Montgomery, stage left, riding a white charger. My contract—my "shadowrun," if you will—was to roust the chipmeisters and get them out of the building. No constraints on how I was to go about it, no questions asked, results being the only things that mattered.

Jenny, I think, expected me to confront the chipmeisters directly, possibly over the iron sights of a big fragging gun. (God knows where she'd built up her exaggerated, romanticized image of me ...) In the old days, maybe she'd have been right; maybe I
would
have taken the direct route. But things have changed. These days, I prefer "social engineering" to hanging my hoop out in the wind.

So how did I handle the chipmeisters? Simple. I staked out the apartment building and identified the dealers' major clients—secondary distributors, mainly, rather than the guttertrash users. Once I had lines on most of them, I sent each one a personal message by registered e-mail, politely informing them that I had reason to suspect that the person they were visiting so regularly at The Avalon was involved in the illegal chip trade—all "for their own good," of course. The kicker was that I CC'd each letter
to
the
Cheyenne
vice
department
!

The upshot? The secondary distributors stopped visiting, and within a couple of days the chipmeisters had moved on. "Shadowrun" complete, zero exposure—just the way I liked it these days.

What? No gunplay? No hashing it out with corp sec-guards? No exchanging friendly volleys of small-arms fire with Lone Star troopers?

Well ...
no
. By choice. You could say I'm getting old, slowing down. I'd say I'm getting
smart,
wising up. There's a lot to be said for subtlety.

I'd never had any desire to prove I was the baddest, steel-hooped motherfragger ever to walk the streets. Not only did an acquaintance of mine—maybe a friend, depending on your definition—have a lock on the title, in my biased opinion, but experience told me too many people got themselves rather dead trying to go that route. Better a live rat than a dead juggernaut, I'd always figured.

And anyway, you needed edge to get out there on the street. Juice, jam, fire, whatever you wanted to call it. You had to have the moves and the instincts ... and when the drek came down, you had to
trust
those instincts. Did I still have the instincts? Over the last year, I hadn't trusted them enough to find out. And, out there in the shadows, that would have made me a walking target.

All right, granted: there was the sheer adrenaline rush of putting your ass on the line, the transcendent joy you couldn't get any other way without feeding BTL signals into your forebrain. But everything came with a cost, and I always had a reminder of that to hand—my
left
hand.

So let Jenny think what she wanted; let her play her shadowrunner games. Let her pretend that she was operating on the periphery of the shadow "major league." Everyone to her own illusions and delusions. I'd played in that major league once—just once, just one night—and I knew I didn't have what it took to survive a second exposure.

I felt the rush of memories, but I headed them off at the mental pass. That was then, this was now—to (mis)quote

Gautama ... or was it Michael Nesmith? I deleted Jenny's congratulations, and brought up the messages from my personal mailbox.

I didn't recognize the originator address of the first message, but when the image came up on the screen, I knew it had to be a guest account on a remote system somewhere. A shock of dirty-blond hair, cut short and subtly spiked. Slender, slightly elongated face—attractive rather than classically beautiful. Brown eyes in a pale, slightly freckled complexion.

"Hoi, bro," my sister Theresa said.

I flicked a key to freeze the playback while I scrutinized her image. There were dark circles under her eyes. Those eyes had once seemed to flash with the sheer joy of being alive. Now they reminded me of documentary footage I'd seen of soldiers shipped back from the insanity of the EuroWars. Her cheeks were slightly hollow, and I guessed that she was still almost ten kilos undermass.

But there were also noticeable improvements. Her eyes were still shell-shocked, but at least they didn't look quite so
wounded
. Her lips were quirked in a tentative half smile—a long way from the old days, when her smile would have brightened up the whole of my dark, dingy doss, but still a vast improvement from just a few months ago. The pain was still there—the pain that had prompted the choices that, in turn, had directed the course of her life. And the pain that those choices had caused her. That pain would probably
always
be there, I realized sadly. But there was a major change for the better. Now she felt pain; before, she had
been
pain ... and there's one frag of a big difference. These days, I could look into her eyes without wincing.

She was bouncing back—finally I could perceive it, and trust that perception. It had taken almost four years—eighteen solid months of detox, analysis, psycho-rehab, chemo-and electro-therapy, followed by twenty-eight months learning how to relate to the real world again. But it was finally starting to pay off. I shook my head. It was absolutely staggering what the human body—and, more important, the human
mind
—could endure without collapsing.

I backed up the replay a couple of seconds and keyed Play.

"Hoi, bro," my sister Theresa said. "Greetings from the Front Range Free Zone. Sorry I missed you, but I'll try again in a couple of days.

"Denver's a wiz place, even more schizo than Seattle, if you can believe it. Have you ever made it down here? I can't remember.

"Anyway, next stop's San Fran, I think, if I can get the datawork cleared. Then maybe I'll swing back through Cheyenne and you can take me out for dinner."

Her tentative smile broadened, and for a moment I could see the old Theresa Montgomery. My mind filled with echoes of sudden enthusiasms and innocent laughter. "I'm still having a blast out here, bro," she continued. "It's a big, wonderful world. Oh, and in case you're wondering .. With a slender hand, she brushed back a blond bang to display her datajack. The jackstopper plug was still firmly in place, the polymer seal unbroken and showing the logo of the detox hospital.

"Still clean," she boasted. "Forty-plus months and counting.

"Catcha ya, Derek." Her image reached toward the screen to break the connection.

Again I paused the playback. I reached out with my left hand, and touched my sister's face—synthetic flesh touching synthesized image.

She was making it, she was really making that long trek back. When the therapists at the medical center had told me she'd been talking about taking a
wanderjahr
—a protracted traveling vacation—I'd been drek-scared. She was too vulnerable, I'd worried, not yet far enough from the precipice of drugs and chips (and worse!) that had almost claimed her. She wouldn't have the strength to resist the thousands of temptations that the real world represented.

They'd known what they were doing, those therapists—I had to admit that now. They'd known what my reaction would be to the news. Instead of letting me have it out with my sister, instead of letting me browbeat her into abandoning the plan, they hadn't even let me speak to her until
I'd
undergone a little therapy of my own. I hadn't been an easy subject, but I'd eventually come to understand. I
couldn't
have stopped Theresa from going on her
wanderjahr,
if that was what she wanted. Sure, it represented a risk—the therapists and detox doctors recognized that. But the damage to her self-esteem if I, or they, had forbidden her to follow her own truth would have been much more devastating, and absolutely certain. It had been a hard sell, but I'd finally accepted that this was the final therapy for Theresa: final confirmation that she had
control
over her own life, and her own direction.

It had been a gamble, but the wager was won. Forty-some months clean and sober. Coming up on four years of experiencing the world as it was, without the anodyne of simsense, BTL, or 2XS. My sister was on her way back from the brink.

And I couldn't put off viewing the second message any longer. I cleared Theresa's image from the screen and pulled up the other entry in my inbox.

Another woman's face, almost as familiar as my sister's. Short, straight, coppery hair. Gray eyes. Class and refinement by the bucketload. Jocasta Yzerman, sister to the dead Lolita Yzerman—I'd known her as Lolly—and a major player in the . . . the
events
. . . that had precipitated my relocation to Cheyenne. Beautiful Jocasta. There was a pain in the middle of my chest that I wished I could write off as indigestion.

Sometimes you want to experience emotional pain in all its fullness; other times you want it over with as fast as humanly possible. I flipped the telecom into double-speed playback.

Even overspeed, her voice was the perfectly modulated velvet of a trained professional. (I wondered momentarily if she still had her trid show on Seattle's KCPS?) I blotted out the words she was speaking—not difficult; the message wasn't anything but a verbal postcard, "long time, how's it rolling," that sort of thing—and I concentrated on that voice. I remembered the first time I'd met her those four years ago, wound up as tight as the string of a compound bow in her tailored smoke gray leathers, a tall and slender figure with a pistol aimed steadily between my eyes ...